“Trying to mine Bitcoin on this 1960s computer seemed both pointless and anachronistic, so I had to give it a shot. Implementing the Bitcoin hash algorithm in assembly code on this 15-bit computer was challenging, but I got it to work.”

Though the AGC may have been a force in the 1960’s, the device unsurprisingly does not hold up to modern crypto mining standards.

Shirriff continued,

“Unfortunately, the computer is so slow that it would take about a million times the age of the universe to successfully mine a Bitcoin block”

He used a $70 USB stick bitcoin miner, which produces more than 130 billion hashes per second, to explain the difference between the AGC and today’s technology,

“To put the AGC’s mining performance in perspective, a USB stick miner performs 130 billion hashes per second. The stick miner costs under $70, compared to $150,000 for the Apollo Guidance Computer… The enormous difference in performance is due to the exponential increase in computer speed described by Moore’s law as well as the advantage of custom Bitcoin mining hardware.”